CROWDED ON THE RIGHT

By NINA BURLEIGH/WASHINGTON

Facing a sea of gray uniforms at the Citadel last week, Pat Buchanan was in his element--a venerated all-male corps of cadets under attack by a young girl and a bunch of misguided federal judges. Buchanan's rhetorical landscape is always filled with symbols of tradition and patriarchy, and his speech to the group didn't lack battlefields, American flags and brave soldiers. Then he described the current national menace: "the men in sandals and beads at the U.S. Department of Education who want to tell the Citadel how to teach history." The young men cheered and laughed uproariously at the image. For Buchanan, that somewhat outmoded hippie is still a real threat, as real as the "evil empire" was a decade ago.

Buchanan, a deeply conservative Catholic who was imbued early on with religiosity by his stern father, according to his autobiography, can still be as outrageous as he was in the 1992 campaign. But now, in the Republican field of 1996, so can his competitors. "It's a very different case this year," he told TIME. "There are other people out there who are basically saying things I agree with." The difference is that Buchanan believes he is a soldier in the "war for America's soul." He knows he probably won't win the presidency-his is a "long, long shot," he says-but his message, and the pro-life purists who love it, could hold sway over whoever does win the G.O.P. nomination. If he's been tempted to give up, he's always been buttressed by his sister Angela ("Bay") Buchanan, who managed his campaign in 1992 and has told him this year that if he decides not to run, she will and will use his signs herself.

For the past two years, Buchanan has juggled a weekday radio show, a syndicated column and cnn's Crossfire. To run for President again, he has relinquished all that media access. "Go, Pat, go!" shouted his radio-show callers during his last week on the air. The host, lanky and buzzing with nervous energy, served up more rhetorical whacks at "the billionaire bankers." Wealthy financiers will figure prominently in his 1996 demonology.

Buchanan, who plans to shape his political message into a book in the coming months, calls himself an "economic patriot" who will fight to preserve American workers' standard of living. He promises to protect American borders against illegal immigration. Buchanan is so hard right that he is staking out a position on that nether region of the political map where right and left meet. Sometimes he sounds like a Rust Belt, union Democrat. "The [real] income of American workers has gone down 20% in 20 years. Now that is an outrage, especially when there are many Americans who made out like bandits at the same time,'' he bellowed into a radio-station mike last January.

The 1992 campaign taught Buchanan a few lessons. For one, he has sold the Mercedes-Benz that earned him so much flak from the "Buy America" crowd. He plans to buy a Pontiac Bonneville as soon as he gets time to shop. In this year's superheated G.O.P. race, that opportunity may come sooner than he thinks.

--By Nina Burleigh/Washington